Gartner has unveiled its "Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Campaign Management, 1Q07," tagging Oracle's Siebel Systems, SAS Institute, Teradata, and Unica as frontrunners of the competitive landscape. The companies are positioned as leaders--vendors with high market visibility, high market penetration, strong market momentum, and a strategic vision for growing the campaign management business, according to Gartner.

Unica had the strongest showing, outpacing all evaluated vendors both in terms of completeness of vision and ability to execute. "The thing that they've done very well is marry the offline and online aspects of the campaign management space," says Gareth Herschel, a research director at Gartner. Typically, Herschel says, a lot of organizations take a fairly siloed approach to campaign management; they have an online view of elements such as email marketing and Web analytics, and a different silo that looks at initiatives like mass mailings, targeted mailings, and event triggering. "What Unica's done is really provide a good road map for how to integrate those two and a complete set of technologies to provide the capabilities organizations need for better online marketing and good traditional direct marketing as well." The report notes, though, that Unica must show continued growth as the multichannel campaign market becomes saturated.

Siebel Marketing has leading functionality, like real-time offers and loyalty marketing, but to keep its leadership differentiation Siebel must continue to show that new customers are deploying the solutions and are achieving solid results, Adam Sarner, a principal research analyst at Garner, writes in the report.

SAS has good capabilities for basic and advanced functionality for campaign management and strong advanced analytic capabilities, but needs a clearer vision for Web analytics and e-marketing as part of a multichannel campaign management strategy, the report states.

NCR in January revealed it plans to spin off all of its Teradata warehousing division to NCR common shareholders, which would lead to the creation of two independent, publicly traded companies. "Teradata's value proposition is its data warehouse, which offers integration with Teradata Customer Manager solution, which includes B2C campaign management capabilities," the report states. The report adds, though, that "CRM is not a separate solution. Clients must invest in Teradata Warehouse as part of the solution."

Aprimo, Infor CRM Epiphany, and SAP are noted as challengers, while Chordiant Software, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle's PeopleSoft (a reentry as a result of Oracle's Applications Unlimited initiative), RightNow Technologies, smartFOCUS, and newcomers Alterian and Eloqua are slated as niche players. ATG is the sole visionary company. SPSS was removed from the quadrant as it is no longer pursuing the multichannel campaign management market, according to the report.

Overall, one of the top trends that Herschel sees in the multichannel campaign management market is the focus on the integration of online and offline environments. By integrating the two, "you can compare how effective marketing spend is in one environment compared with another environment, so it's much more of an apples-to-apples comparison," he says. Another trend, according to Herschel, is taking the insights gleaned from one channel and leveraging that information in another. For instance, "taking insights about what works in an email marketing campaign and what people are looking at on the Web site, and turning that into insight that you apply in the direct marketing environment."